The first seo return ain.

  It was a dull, deep-burning as if every fiber of his being was being torn and rebuilt at the same time. It was not the pain of a on wound. No. It was something more... a, insidious as if something inside him was dev his own body in aernal cycle of death ah.

  He tried to move, but his body felt heavy, trapped in a viscous liquid that squeezed his chest.

  -Where am I, the darkness surrounds me, I 't see anything, I don't know where I am, my memories are blurry, am I alive, I feel a little cold and my body feels damp.

  The thought came as a whisper in his mind. His eyelids struggled to open, and when they did, the first thing he saw was a reddish glow, flickering lights reflected on the surface of what looked like... gss?

  He wao speak, but only bubbles emerged from his mouth, dissipating into the liquid around him. His vision was blurred, but with effort, he distinguished wires ected to his body, ied in his back, his arms... something was iing him with a strange fluid.

  Fear and uainty flooded his being, about what was happening around him. Although it was not easy to distinguish what was beyond the gss, a loud deafening hat mixed screams, voices, and arms resent in the pce.

  He had been in dangerous situations before. He remembered the smell of iron, the sensation of a bde pierg soft flesh, and the st breaths of those whose lives he took without hesitation. But this... this was not what was supposed to happen. He was dead. His memories were slowly ing back with crity.

  The frontation. The lethal wound. The darkness.

  So why was he alive?

  A high-pitched beeping echoed in the room. Something had ged. The pressure in his chest eased as the fluid began to drain with a sug sound. His previously heavy limbs regained mobility. A metallig annouhe opening of the capsule, and he fell to his knees on a cold, slippery floor.

  He coughed. His breathing was erratic as if his lungs did nhe air in this pce. His hands rested on the floor, and that's when he felt it.

  The burning. The rot.

  His veins throbbed with a poisonous energy, he didn't know what it was, but he was sure it was something threatening to devour him from the inside. He looked at his hands and saw the marks: reddish scars, patterns that spread like withered roots across his skin. This was his inal body, but something different dwelled inside him.

  A sound made him look up.

  All around him, the room was a boratory in ruins. Shattered test tubes, some with peared to be the same stuff that flooded his body. He could alm as if it were a part of him, papers scattered on the floor, a chemical smell permeating the air. And in the gloom, shadowy figures watched him.

  -It 't be...” whispered a voi the distance.

  He looked up, his eyes burning with a strange light. His rebirth had begun, and with it, the curse he carried.

  - “We have to take care of him, the lord told us to iigate him, we 't just leave him here.”-he poio one of the figures in the room.

  -You're kidding, we don't know what that guy is, you saw what happeo the st one who touched him,” said one of the stists, ”we'd better get out of here as soon as possible, they're getting closer.

  The two stists who were in the room run out leaving the man still limp o floor. For a moment the room was filled with a desote silence, a silehat did not st long.

  A crash shook the walls of the boratory, followed by screams and the metallic sound of g ons. The flickering light from the monitors illuminated corpses strewn across the floor, stists a subjects who had not had a ce to escape.

  He staggered to his feet, his body still feeling alien. Reddish scars glowed faintly on his skin, and the burning in his veins did not cease.

  Another impact. The ceiling shook, and a portion of the wall colpsed, revealing a long, dark corridor. From there, a new sound came: hurried footsteps, agitated breaths... and a stifled scream followed by the wet sound of a body falling to the floor, Something was hunting in here.

  Still disoriented, he kept walking. He didn't know where he was or why, but he did uand ohing, when an enviro bees a death trap, the first thing to do is to look for a way out.

  With his strength. His bare feet touched the cold, wet floor, sticky with something he didn't want to ioo closely. He advanced down the corridor, following the only possible dire. Emergency lights tinkled in shades of red and yellow, illuminating from the rocky walls surrounding the pce.

  As he turned a er, his foot bumped into something. He looked down.

  A body. It was a man dressed in dark clothes, covered with some kind of armored vest. His neck en from side to side, a precise, wound. It was not an impromptu executioo the corpse was a metal bandana with a carved symbol... an emblem he didn't reize.

  He frowned.

  -A militia? Soldiers? I've never seen a uniform like that before,” he thought.

  He didn't have much time to reflect.

  A new sound came from up ahead. His eyes lifted just in time to see a figure moving in the shadows. A man dressed in bck, with a white fox mask c his face, appeared with a kunai dripping blood in his hand.

  The man reized the stance immediately. This was no makeshift criminal. He was a hunter, someoh special training, a simir training he had undergone as a young man in his other life, special training to assassinate people.

  The masked man sensing another presence, saw the staggering man holding onto one of the rocky walls. He tensed, with a bat stahat screamed danger.

  -A survivor...” he muttered. It was not a statement of relief. It was a firmation of something more dangerous, a sign that the victim would be him.

  The assassin did not respond.

  His body still felt clumsy, but his bat instincts, those that had defined him in his past life, were quickly awakening. If this man was ing to kill him, he needed a on.

  He couldn't make a move before a sed explosion rocked the hallway. Both were thrown backward by the shockwave. The assassin smmed into a wall, his vision blurring for an instant.

  The smoke from the explosion was slowly dissipating, leaving behind a trail of destru. When he mao get to his feet, he saw something terrifying.

  The explosion had blown a hole in the wall, revealing another ruined corridor, and a smell of ash and burnt flesh permeated the air. Dozens of bodies littered the floor, bodies of stists and men in the same clothing he had seen earlier, some with deep burns, others with cuts, many with expressions of horror frozen on their faces.

  The assassin blirying to clear his vision. The ninja in the fox mask had disappeared. His gaze swept down the ruined hallway, there was no trace of his body, not even blood. Only a corpses and the distant sound of bat elsewhere. Had he fled? Or was he moving in the shadows, waiting to strike again?

  He didn't have time to think about it too much, In front of him, someone else had appeared, in the gloom of the tunnel, anure was standing.

  A new enemy was standing in the rubble, not moving. His silhouette was tall and firm, his posture carefree but charged with fidence. His dark hair fell in dark locks over his face, and his tactical vest, simir to that of the fallen ninja earlier, was stained with alien blood. His front shield bore a different emblem than before. the man knew immediately that he should not uimate whoever was there.

  The ninja noticed it too.

  -Another one, no one be left alive,” he mumbled.

  But the man did not uand. He didn't knoas an ally and who was an enemy. He only knew ohing, this pce was a death trap, and he o get out before he got caught in this shadow war.